Stop catching jatka and hilsa will return, SAARC fisheries specialist writes

On 12 April 2026, while Jatka Conservation Week 2026 was under way, the news site Jago News published a column by Dr Md Shariful Islam, senior programme specialist (fisheries) at the SAARC Agriculture Centre in Farmgate, Dhaka, arguing that Bangladesh can fill its seas and rivers with hilsa again only if it stops catching jatka, the young of the fish. His title borrowed the theme the government had chosen for the week, which ran from 7 to 13 April: "Stop catching jatka, and hilsa will fill the seas and rivers".

The column appeared at a difficult moment for the national fish. At a press conference at the Secretariat in Dhaka on 6 April, Fisheries and Livestock Minister Mohammad Amin Ur Rashid had presented Department of Fisheries figures showing that hilsa production fell to 5 lakh tonnes in the 2024-25 fiscal year, the lowest in eight years, and had called raising production a huge challenge. This report sets out the writer's argument, then the rules, figures and research that applied on the day it was published.

Dr Islam opened with the place of hilsa in Bengali life, from panta-ilish to festival meals, and wrote that this symbol of pride was facing many challenges. The week, in his view, was not just a programme but a moment of awareness, feeling and national commitment at once, and the time had come to take responsibility: to save jatka and increase hilsa.

His central argument was simple. Jatka is a small fish, but it holds great potential: young hilsa that are not caught grow into adult fish within a short time, so each jatka that is spared becomes, in his words, the source of many future hilsa. If people are patient today, he wrote, the river will return it many times over tomorrow. He cited research in general terms for this point, without naming a particular study.

He reminded readers that hilsa production had once fallen to close to two lakh tonnes, and credited the recovery that followed to proper planning, above all stronger jatka conservation. That success, he wrote, had taught the country that saving jatka means securing the future.

He listed the tools the government already used: a complete ban on catching jatka at set times of the year; sanctuaries in important river stretches where fishing stops entirely; food aid and alternative livelihood support for fishers during bans; and, for the week itself, a campaign of awareness events on riverbanks, discussions at schools and colleges and publicity in the media, all aimed at showing that letting small fish go brings a larger gain back.

He did not present the problem as an easy one. Poverty, a lack of other income and a lack of awareness, he wrote, often leave fishers unable to obey the bans, and some dishonest rings keep buying and selling jatka in secret. River pollution, the loss of navigability and climate change were putting hilsa breeding at further risk. Laws alone would not be enough, he argued; people's mindset and a shared sense of responsibility had to change.

His sharpest appeal was to buyers. Consumers' decisions shape the market, he wrote, and if people refuse to buy jatka, the jatka market will close by itself. He called for awareness in families, in society and among children that catching small fish harms the future, and for sustainable alternative income so that fishers do not fall into a livelihood crisis during bans. He described hilsa as an indicator of the health of rivers as well as an economic resource: if the river survives, hilsa survives, and with it the livelihoods of the people who depend on it.

The SAARC Agriculture Centre, where Dr Islam works, is a regional centre of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). It was set up in 1988 as the SAARC Agricultural Information Centre and took its present name in 2007. Its headquarters are in the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) complex at Farmgate in Dhaka.

The centre promotes research and development in agriculture and allied sectors across South Asia. Its broader mandate is to help member states tackle shared food and farming problems by strengthening agricultural research and extension systems, knowledge management and agricultural policy and programme development. Its eight member countries are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Fisheries is one of the centre's six main thrust areas, alongside crops, natural resource management, horticulture, livestock, and priority setting and programme development. Its flagship programmes include the SAARC Food Bank, the SAARC Seed Bank and the SAARC Seed Forum.

Hilsa is a shared South Asian resource, which is one reason a regional fisheries specialist writes about it. Banglapedia lists the fish in the Indus in Pakistan, in the rivers of eastern and western India and in the Irrawaddy in Myanmar, as well as in the Padma, Jamuna, Meghna, Karnaphuli and coastal rivers of Bangladesh. The Daily Star reported on 7 April 2026 that Bangladesh ranks first among 11 hilsa-producing countries.

The Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock observed the week in 20 hilsa-rich districts. According to The Daily Star, it combined a three-day central programme with awareness campaigns at district and upazila level. At the 6 April press conference the minister asked people to refrain from catching, buying, selling and stocking jatka, and said monitoring would run from the sea to the market during the week.

The same press conference announced a separate measure: a 58-day ban on all fishing in the Bay of Bengal and adjoining areas from 15 April to 11 June, to conserve hilsa. State Minister for Fisheries and Livestock Sultan Salahuddin Tuku said extra support, including food, would be given to fishers where needed, and warned that irregularities in distributing aid would not be tolerated, Dhaka Times reported.

The week was opened on the afternoon of 7 April at Molhead in Chandpur Sadar. The state news agency BSS quoted the minister as saying: "বিদ্যমান আইন কঠোরভাবে মেনে চলার মাধ্যমে জাটকা নিধন সম্পূর্ণভাবে বন্ধ করতে হবে" (jatka killing must be stopped completely by strictly following the existing laws). He urged everyone from fishers to consumers to help protect jatka for future generations, and told fishers that staying off the water for at least two months would let small hilsa grow larger and heavier and so earn them more later.

Ministry secretary Md Delowar Hossain presided over the Chandpur event. Department of Fisheries director general Md Zia Haider Chowdhury and Bangladesh Fisheries Research Institute (BFRI) director general Dr Anuradha Bhadra were among those present, as were members of the Navy, the Coast Guard, the river police and local fishers, according to BSS.

On 8 April a workshop titled "Hilsa Research: Achievements, Jatka Conservation and Future Tasks" was held at the BARC auditorium in Dhaka. The minister asked scientists to take a more active part in research on raising jatka numbers through the proper hatching of hilsa eggs, without spoiling the fish's natural taste. He told fishers that the nets and the rivers were theirs and that they could give the government practical proposals on how to stop jatka fishing. The keynote paper was presented by Dr Mohammad Ashraful Alam of BFRI.

At the same workshop, the state minister said hilsa is a geographical indication product of Bangladesh and that about 70 to 80 percent of the world's hilsa is produced in the country. He said food assistance had reached 40,000 fisher families over the previous two months, each receiving 80 kg of rice, 12 kg of flour, 10 litres of oil, 4 kg of sugar, 8 kg of lentils and 16 kg of potatoes, worth about Tk 6,000 in all, and that fishers had never received this much help before, BSS reported.

In law, jatka means a hilsa shorter than 25 centimetres. The column's figure of 23 centimetres was the older limit: when it opened Jatka Conservation Week in April 2023, the ministry said the limit had been raised from 23 to 25 centimetres (9 to 10 inches) and that the jatka ban had been extended to eight months, from November to June, the daily Inqilab reported.

For the 2025-26 season, the eight-month nationwide ban began on 1 November 2025 and was set to run until 30 June 2026. It covers catching, transporting, marketing, buying, selling and storing jatka. The Financial Express reported that the ban is enforced under the Fish Protection and Conservation Ordinance as amended in 2025 and the Protection and Conservation of Fish Rules 1985, with a penalty of up to two years in prison, a fine of up to Tk 5 lakh, or both.

The same report said the Department of Fisheries carries out the ban together with district and upazila administrations, the Navy, the Coast Guard, the river police, RAB and other law enforcement agencies, under the ministry's supervision. When it opened the 2023 week, the ministry said raids and mobile courts work on the coast, in rivers, at landing sites and in fish and wholesale markets during the ban.

Jatka protection sits inside a calendar of other closures. Earlier in the same season, the Hilsa Conservation Campaign 2025 ran from 4 to 25 October 2025, a 22-day ban to protect brood hilsa at the peak of spawning. WorldFish notes that this brood-hilsa ban was extended from 11 to 22 days among the policy changes that came out of the ECOFISH project. In April 2026, the 58-day sea ban announced on 6 April was added from 15 April.

Banglapedia records that juvenile hilsa are caught from February to May, the months covered by the jatka ban and the sanctuary closures. A BFRI survey carried out in 1992-94 estimated that about 3,500 to 4,000 tonnes of jatka were caught each year in the January to April season, and that more than half of the jatka catch came from the Meghna.

Hilsa, Tenualosa ilisha, belongs to the herring family, Clupeidae, and is the national fish of Bangladesh. Banglapedia describes a strongly compressed, silvery body that can reach 60 centimetres, with common fish of 35 to 40 centimetres and large ones weighing about 2.5 kg. Females grow faster and are usually larger than males, and the fish matures in one to two years.

The fish is anadromous: adults live at sea and swim up rivers to spawn in fresh water. FishBase records that hilsa school in coastal waters and can ascend rivers for up to 1,200 kilometres, usually 50 to 100 kilometres, and that barrages sometimes block the migration. It feeds mainly on plankton by filtering water, and its diet includes blue-green algae, diatoms, copepods and rotifers.

A large female can produce up to 2 million free-floating eggs, according to Banglapedia. Spawning happens through the year, with a minor season in February and March and a major one in September and October, mainly upstream in the Padma, Jamuna and Meghna. The young grow in river channels for some weeks, reaching 12 to 20 centimetres about six to ten weeks after hatching, and then go down to the sea to feed before returning to the rivers as adults. Jatka, in other words, are fish on their way to the sea, which is why the same river stretches that hold them are protected.

FishBase gives the length at first maturity as 31.3 centimetres, well above the 25-centimetre legal limit for jatka. On the IUCN Red List the species was assessed as Least Concern in January 2013. In August 2017 The Daily Star reported that the Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks had completed the procedures to register hilsa as Bangladesh's second geographical indication product, after Jamdani sari.

Bangladesh protects the main jatka nursery grounds as hilsa sanctuaries. By June 2018, when the sixth was declared, Dhaka Tribune listed them as follows:

• the Meghna from Shatnol in Chandpur to Char Alexander in Lakshmipur, 100 km;
• the Shahbazpur Channel of the Meghna estuary in Bhola, 90 km;
• the Tentulia River in Bhola, 100 km;
• the Andharmanik River in Patuakhali, 40 km;
• the lower Padma in Shariatpur, 20 km;
• the Meghna from Hizla to Mehendiganj in Barishal, the sixth sanctuary, declared in June 2018.

All fishing stops in the sanctuaries during their closed months. According to Dhaka Tribune, the first ban of the year runs in March and April in all sanctuaries except the Andharmanik, where the closure runs from November to January. Jago News reported on 9 April 2026 that a total of 432 kilometres in Chandpur, Bhola, Patuakhali, Shariatpur and Barishal had been designated as sanctuaries, but researchers it quoted said the fish were not safe even there.

The 2025 closure of the Chandpur stretch shows how a sanctuary ban works on the ground. The Business Standard reported on 28 February 2025 that fishing in the 100-kilometre stretch from Shatnal in Matlab to Alexander in Ramgati would be banned from 1 March to 30 April, with buying, selling and storing hilsa also banned. Lakshmipur had 38,875 fishers, of whom 28,344 were to receive food assistance, and district fisheries officer Mohammad Bellal Hossain said a task force had been formed with members of the law enforcement agencies.

The Department of Fisheries figures that the minister presented on 6 April, as reported by Jago News on 9 and 11 April 2026, show how the catch had moved in recent years:

• 2017-18: 5.17 lakh tonnes;
• 2018-19: 5.32 lakh tonnes;
• 2019-20: 5.50 lakh tonnes;
• 2020-21: 5.65 lakh tonnes;
• 2021-22: 5.66 lakh tonnes;
• 2022-23: 5.71 lakh tonnes, the highest;
• 2023-24: 5.29 lakh tonnes;
• 2024-25: 5.00 lakh tonnes, the lowest since 2016-17.

The column's figure of 5.5 to 6 lakh tonnes a year therefore described the best years of the early 2020s rather than the most recent official figure. The earlier low that the writer mentioned is also on record: in October 2023 the then fisheries minister, SM Rezaul Karim, said production had fallen to 1.99 lakh tonnes in 2002-03 before rising to 2.98 lakh tonnes in 2008-09 and 5.71 lakh tonnes in 2022-23, The Business Standard reported.

Estimates of hilsa's weight in the economy differ by source. The minister said on 6 April 2026 that over 80 percent of the world's hilsa comes from the rivers, estuaries and coastal waters of Bangladesh, that hilsa makes up about 9.79 percent of the country's total fish production and about 1 percent of GDP, and that about 6 lakh people are directly involved in hilsa fishing, with another 20 to 25 lakh engaged in transport, marketing, net and boat making, ice production, processing and export, according to The Daily Star. The column put the world share at more than 75 percent and hilsa's share of national fish production at about 12 percent; WorldFish, in April 2025, also gave 12 percent of the country's total fish catch, valued the fishery at over 3 billion US dollars a year and said it supports 2.5 million people.

The fall had been visible a year earlier. In April 2025 The Daily Star reported that the 2023-24 haul was the lowest in seven years, about 42,000 tonnes below the year before, citing figures from the Department of Fisheries and the Barishal divisional fisheries office. Before Pahela Baishakh that year, hilsa of about 500 grams sold for around Tk 1,100 a kg in Barishal and fish over 1 kg for more than Tk 3,000 a kg.

The column listed poverty, illegal trade, pollution, siltation and climate change as the threats. Scientists and officials had described the same pressures in more detail before it appeared. In The Daily Star's April 2025 report, Dr Mohammad Abu Kawsar Didar, a scientific officer at BFRI in Chandpur, said: "There's a limit to how much hilsa can be harvested sustainably -- and we've crossed that threshold." He said hilsa prefer water deeper than five metres, but that on many migration routes the depth had fallen to two or three metres.

In the same report, Narendranath Biswas, deputy director of the Barishal divisional fisheries office, described the limits of enforcement: "Unfortunately, guarding hundreds of kilometres across rivers and estuaries is nearly impossible." The report named Hizla, Mehendiganj and Bhola as key spawning grounds and the Meghna-Tetulia, Payra-Bishkhali and Sundarbans routes as the main migration paths.

Jago News reported on 9 April 2026 that a Department of Fisheries survey had found hilsa movement obstructed at 17 places, 14 of them in the Meghna, by submerged shoals and chars. An evaluation under the department's Hilsa Resource Development and Management project found that the average weight of a hilsa had fallen from 500-550 grams seven years earlier to 300-350 grams, and project director Molla Emdadullah said fine "current nets" and large char nets were catching hilsa of every size, jatka included, before they could breed.

Md Anisur Rahman, a former chief scientific officer of BFRI, told the same report that silt, loss of navigability, untimely rain, rising salinity, industrial waste, pesticides and plastic were together harming hilsa, and that a hilsa can live up to seven years but fish older than three or four years were now hard to find. BFRI chief scientific officer Dr Mohammad Ashraful Alam said the number of submerged shoals at the estuaries had risen alarmingly and blocked the mother hilsa's journey upstream.

Some of these pressures are old. Banglapedia records that until about 1972 the hilsa fishery was mainly upstream in the Padma, Meghna, Karatoya, Rupsa, Shibsa and Payra, and that it later became concentrated downstream and in coastal waters. It lists low Ganges discharge and siltation linked to the Farakka Barrage, overfishing of jatka, disrupted migration routes, habitat loss, pollution and water development projects among the suggested causes of that shift.

The writer's call for alternative income has a long policy history. In April 2023 the ministry said that in the 2022-23 fiscal year, VGF rice had gone to 3,60,869 fishing families in 97 upazilas of 20 districts during the jatka season, each receiving 40 kg a month for four months, a total of 57,739 tonnes, the daily Inqilab reported. During the 2025 sanctuary closures, fishers in Lakshmipur were to receive food assistance under the same VGF programme.

Fishers' own accounts explain why the bans are hard to keep. In The Daily Star's April 2025 report, Alauddin Mia, a fisherman from Bhola Sadar, said: "The quantity of hilsa we caught last year wasn't enough to pay off our debts." Ibrahim Majhi, a fisherman in Kuakata, said: "Spending over Tk 2 lakh per trip has pushed us deep into debt."

Evidence that support and local enforcement can work together comes from the ECOFISH project, run by WorldFish with the government. WorldFish reported in April 2025 that locally formed hilsa conservation groups enforced the rules while fishers received alternative livelihood support; that hilsa catches rose by 10 to 11 percent a year and the average size of fish caught nearly doubled; and that household incomes in project areas rose by 86.19 percent, against 52.66 percent in comparison areas, with a return on investment of 32.8 percent. The same work led to the 3,188-square-kilometre Nijhum Dwip Marine Protected Area.

The buyer's side of the chain, which the column stressed, is covered by the law as well: the jatka ban applies to buying, selling, transporting and storing young hilsa, not only to catching them. During the week, the minister's appeal on 6 April was addressed to the same people the writer had in mind, asking everyone to stay away from catching, buying, selling and stocking jatka.

Photo: Nahid Sultan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jago News, Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS), The Daily Star, Dhaka Times, Independent Television, The Financial Express, The Daily Inqilab, The Business Standard, Dhaka Tribune, WorldFish, Banglapedia, FishBase, SAARC Agriculture Centre, Wikipedia